Writers: Dennis C. Lewiston from a story by Gerry O’Hara
From: Cult Cinema
A rich man’s wife starts having an affair only to learn her partner is a criminal who may have specific plans for her.
An erotic thriller that’s neither erotic nor thrilling. Shock of shocks, the Cult Cinema set offers up another mediocre flick. In brief:
Christine meets Greg in the park when their dogs get into a minor fight. He reveals that he knows she’s the wife of a major business guy who does business stuff (80’s!). Rather than start flirting with her, he immediately goes into creepy stalker mode by getting her number from her vet, calling her, and then demanding she meet him at his apartment. For some reason, she does. He gets an impression of her keys while she’s cleaning up after sex and tells her that he’s a crook. Even the apartment that they’re in belongs to someone else.
They continue to hook up until he breaks into her house one night to steal all her jewelry. He wakes her up and tries having sex with her in the billiard room, but her husband catches them. A scuffle ensues and the husband gets killed. Greg tells Christine to stay quiet and that he’ll sort it out, but the police inspector is being really aggressive and getting close to the truth. Greg goes back to the apartment where he stashed the jewels, but the original owner is there. Another scuffle, Greg gets stabbed in the belly and kills the owner with a candlestick (“billiard room,” “candlestick.” Was this movie was plotted on a Clue board?).
Greg calls Christine, she rushes out and drives him to a criminal doctor on the docks. Her car is surrounded echoing a dream she had at the start of the movie, but it’s only the doctor and his associates. They take Greg from the car and tell her to leave. Three weeks later, she arrives at Greg’s funeral. We know it’s three weeks because the cops shadowing her say so. The chief inspector gives the rest of the story: Greg was found dead in the ocean, there’s no positive ID of Christine or Greg at the scene of the second murder, and Christine is not going to be pursued for the death of her husband. They leave and the camera pans back to reveal Greg, still alive!, watching Christine put flowers on his grave. Rather than approach her, he walks away. THE END.
You can get a sense of what the movie’s going for: a woman seduced by a roguish stranger and then caught up in a criminal conspiracy. Only the movie imagines Greg has sincere feelings for Christine. In fact, the movie wants you to like, maybe even sympathize with Greg, when he’s a real creeper. I mean, this isn’t Going Steady-levels of creepiness, but he’s immediately stalking her and ignoring her demands that he stop. I think the movie wants us to believe that the erotic tension between the two of them is so intense that she’s not sincerely telling him to back off, but there’s no sense of tension here. It just feels like she wants him to stop following her.
Then the rest of the plot just doesn’t work. Maybe it’s because I don’t buy them as a couple, but a lot of the drama, post-murder, depends on him trying to be with Christine when it seems more likely that he’d be cutting loose to let her take the blame. It’d be a more interesting movie if, rather than being overcome by desire for her and having to see her one last time while robbing her house, his entire plan had been a sadistic mind game to have her take the fall for her husband’s murder. Alternately, because an early scene in the movie features the husband screwing over a business rival, I halfway expected Greg to be working for that guy as part of some larger corporate espionage scheme. Two words: better movie.
So the movie’s dull, imagines its characters as sexier than they are, and is front-loaded with a lot of nudity that just feels sleazy. On top of that, no big moments of camp or crazy so it’s not even like I can tell you to find a copy on YouTube and jump to this or that point. Skip it—it’s just “blah.”
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